«Hola! ¿Hablas inglés?» I asked the woman who answered the phone in the Barcelona restaurant. 

I was calling in a futile attempt to make a reservation for the CNET team dinner during Mobile World Congress this year. Unfortunately, I don’t know Spanish (I learned French and German at school). And as it turned out, she didn’t speak English either.

«No!» she said, and brusquely hung up.

What I needed in that moment was the kind of AI call translation feature that’s becoming increasingly prevalent on phones — including those made by Samsung and Google, and, starting next week, Honor.

When Honor unveils its Magic V5 foldable at a launch event on Aug. 28 in London, it will come with what the company is calling «the industry’s first on-device large speech model,» which will allow live AI call translation to take place on device, with no cloud processing.

Currently the phone supports six languages — English, Chinese, French, German, Italian and Spanish. For aforementioned reasons, I can’t test all of these, but I’ve already had a play around with the feature and can confirm it did a very effective job of translating my garbled messages into French. I only wish I’d had it available to me in Spain when I needed it.

The model Honor has deployed was designed by the company in collaboration with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, based on the open-source Whisper model, said Fei Fang, president of product at Honor in an interview. It’s been optimized for streaming speech recognition, automatic language detection and translation inference acceleration (that’s speed and efficiency, to you and I).

According to Fang, Honor’s user experience studies have shown that as long as translation occurs within 1.5 seconds, it doesn’t «induce waiting anxiety,» in anyone attempting to use AI call translation. As such, it’s made sure to keep the latency to within these parameters so you won’t get anxious waiting for the translation to kick in. 

«We also work together with industry language experts to consistently and comprehensively evaluate the accuracy of our output,» she added. «The assessment is primarily based on five metrics: accuracy, logical coherence, readability, grammatical correctness and conciseness.»

In addition to Honor’s AI model, live translation is being powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite chip. The 8 Elite’s NPU allows multimodal generative AI applications to be integrated onto the device. Honor’s algorithms work together with the NPU to keep power consumption as low as possible while maintaining the required accuracy of the translations, said Christopher Patrick, SVP of mobile handsets at Qualcomm.

There are a number of benefits to having the AI model embedded on the Magic V5, but perhaps the most compelling is the privacy it guarantees. It means that everything is processed locally and your calls will therefore remain completely confidential. The fact that the model lives on device and you don’t need to download voice packages also reduces its storage needs.

Another benefit of running the model on the phone itself is «offline usability,» said Patrick. «All conversation information is stored directly on-device and users can access it anytime, anywhere, without network restrictions.»

The work Honor has done on AI call translation is set to be recognized at the upcoming Interspeech conference on speech science and tech. But already, Honor is thinking about how this use of AI can be used to enable other new and exciting features for the people who buy its phones.

«Beyond the essential user scenario of call translation, Honor’s on-device large speech model will also be deployed in scenarios such as face-to-face translation [and] AI subtitles,» said Fang. The process of developing the speech model has allowed Honor’s AI team to gain extensive experience of model optimization, which it will use to develop other AI applications, she added.

«Looking ahead, we will continue to expand capabilities in areas such as emotion recognition and health monitoring, further empowering voice interactions with your on-device AI assistant,» she said.

Honor has unveiled a new flip phone in China, and the company is billing it as, «the ultimate selfie device.» The Magic V Flip 2 includes an ultra-wide portrait mode, AI photography features and a playful, sparkly design.

The Magic V Flip 2 adds another device to Honor’s increasing lineup of foldable phones. So far, it’s only releasing the Magic V Flip 2 in China, starting on Aug. 28. It will sell for RMB 5,499 or about $766 USD.

The Magic V Flip2 appears to be geared toward influencers and fashionistas — a limited edition version of the new phone is co-designed by fashion icon Jimmy Choo and is, «inspired by the subtle shimmer of crystals.» It comes in deep sea blue and has a crushed stardust design, according to Honor’s press release.

Honor is also touting the phone’s 5,500mAh battery, which it says is the largest on the market for a flip phone. The also phone features a 200-megapixel main camera, a 50-megapixel ultra-wide camera and a 50 MP selfie camera. The Magic V Flip 2’s closest competition may be Samsung’s Galaxy Flip 7 FE, which is about $200 more expensive than the Magic V Flip 2.

Hollow Knight: Silksong is the follow-up, announced back in 2019, to one of the most beloved indie games of the last decade. In a special announcement video on Thursday, Australian developer Team Cherry revealed that the wait is almost over. 

Silksong will be released on Sept. 4, according to the new trailer. The almost two-minute video reveals some of the new enemies and bosses in the upcoming spinoff and ends with the surprise release date. 

Originally, Silksong was going to be a DLC for Hollow Knight. However, numerous delays resulted in it being pushed back again and again. Glimpses of the game would show up here and there over the years, but it was this year that it received the most attention from Nintendo as part of its Switch 2 lineup, and from Microsoft, which confirmed it would be available on Xbox Game Pass. 

Hollow Knight: Silksong will be available on PC, Switch, Switch 2, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Series S, PS4 and PS5. It will be available on Day 1 for Xbox Game Pass subscribers.